let's face it, yet a birds nest on the ground. he had everything going for him and he wasn't about to give that a period when of the situations i was concerned about that i've seen happen with similar groups in the past was he would need to do something in order to bring about his prophecy of this armageddon weblog first episode they compound. they could all die in in three days to be resurrected and he would be the good she says at that time and they would be living in the garden of eden. ..

looking at segregation between school districts in long island and this and that between these issues but the reason i wrote it is i go out to the public schools when i was in second grade in the inner city

in the housing projects in the poor neighborhoods in the city so it was something i had thought about actively since i was a little kid and so when it came into the supreme court i was interested in following that >> host: talking about the personal pieces i like to ask people their personal connection in the story when we get into the meat of it did you have a particularly stance on bus segregation? >> guest: i think they don't think about it and looking back to when i was looking at the reaction from the kids in the 70's when they started busting a lot of the kids would say i like it at this school. they didn't think about it but as i got older i started to think about not only going to schools and being surrounded by

poverty that i didn't see in my neighborhood in the suburbs, but you know, at the same time in the schools that i had attended there was tracking so you have the regular program and in the advanced program they are close race on the class lines and so as a kid you absorb that and start to think about it and i remember being in high school one of the only class is i took was mixed between the tracks in a global studies course there was an african-american student in the class who tried to test the program at one point and she couldn't get in and she was very intelligent and soft spoken i was in tenth grade thinking about these tracks and i think reflecting on that you have desegregation but at the same time in the schools you still

have segregation and you are sending the message to kids when you have glasses that are supposed to be the smart kids and full of black kids they're supposed to be the not smart kids and so i think myself and a lot of my classmates hits home and it makes you think about how this has worked out and i've always been interested in this idea of how we do diversity well. >> host: in the american life and the educational history over the past 50 years if we could desegregate and forced the hand of schools on the policy makers that we could have a more diverse school and a greater education not just on the quality that equity. you're but pushes back against of that but brown v. board talks

a little bit about what brown has meant on the equality and access in the country so far. >> guest: i think it is a hard question because we hold up brown has this amazing defeated we accomplish this and we've rolled back segregation and look at what happened afterwards on how incredibly difficult it was, divisive in some ways, but we had a ferry in incremental process after the other was very frustrating i think for people and so it is seen as a great victory but also it's important with research to look back and see what we didn't accomplish yet and so when i was looking at a desegregation and how it was finally implemented 20 years after and was handed down he started busting but in the way the programs are set up still

maintains privilege poor kids and had to be bused for more time and part of it was logistics but it's maintaining the status quo so i think the brown decision is a difficult decision and the most interesting books i've read is what brown v the board of education should have said to the academics looking at what the justice is if they had done it differently what might have changed things and it's interesting. you probably wouldn't have had the unanimous decision which was very important, but it's interesting to look at the counterfactual and think about what our victory was and also what it did not accomplish. >> host: is a difficult to write a book that pushes back on such a celebrated public policy? we want to consider the great victories of the 20th century

for america. did you push back against the or highlight the story of people that pushback? >> guest: yes but it's not a book that i expected to write. i went into it thinking especially that integration was a good thing and it brought people in, it did, it brought people together. it made me think differently about the world than i might have otherwise with a lot of my classmates in the same way and i think what are dhaka other points to make often in the book is that you -- during the heyday of the desegregation you actually saw the gap shrinking faster than it ever has said that is a big deal and i think that there were accomplishments -- >> host: but what about the desegregation as such or having a 66 the gap was so huge in the

40's, 50's and 60's and their resources into building sometimes we want to argue the actual desegregation process was infidel. >> guest: i think that's hard to separate that out. when you talk about people but researched how does the integration affect kids it's hard to say is it because kids are learning from each other or is it because if you are a black child in the classroom its majority white middle class so you might have more resources in that school than you would other otherwise. so his favorite saying it was green and white and that's why he supported segregation at the time. so yeah, i think that's a very difficult and complicated question and there's also a lot of other things going on at the time when that achievement gap

was closing to the it wasn't just desegregation. i want to make it clear that i think it was a very important thing to do. but i did -- i was surprised i ended up writing this book looking at what went wrong. it's not what i expected to write about. >> host: but you open up the book and the first section is about the letters and i found it compelling as you tell the story of this girl that the dreamed of going to high school and she dreamed of it all of her life, 15 years of her life. she essentially was told she couldn't go, saying the school couldn't have more than 42% african-americans, and as a result, she was being put on a waiting list that might deal her dream of getting a good education having a lawyer. that kind of story was compelling. how much of that came up in your research and are you telling case is or is this a narrative of people? >> guest: i think those stories to me are what made it interesting. it's how emotionally connected

people felt with of the school, central high school which is what the book really focused on. but how they saw the school in the part of it is no other school in the city had a program but was also an emotional connection. her dad had gone, her mom had gone. you know, it was the black school for decades and decades and so people had a very emotional connection to it, and the father was a very good school coming and it was a very good school. at the time and etds eventually they put an advanced program and so we have the elite in the black community and to that school. so, you know, the people i talked to in the book, there are two things going on all this concern about the educational equality but also what about our schools, and this is our

community and it's important that we have a say in our school. >> as people got those letters in the metaphorical sense since the engineering of the 1950's was producing outcomes that were unintended but nonetheless harmful, how soon did people in the town realize it probably needed to make some sort of adjustment or policy pushback? >> guest: there's a lot of that. the desegregation was sort of negotiated over the years. there's lots of fights. there's this ongoing constant conflict in some ways. and so, i think that for some people high-profile activists who were really behind this fight and they had gone to central pre-segregation and felt very connected to the school. so for them they had been watching this and they were very concerned that desegregation was going to close.

they had sold their riding on wall because so many others had been closed. >> host: why were they closed as opposed to shifting demographically? >> guest: it happened a lot of wear to make the busing work you have a lot more schools in places we need it because we swept the populations of there's an interesting story in north carolina. there are these two schools, there's a black high school and a white high school and when they had to desegregate the closed the black school and part of that, you know, i think they are trying to convince people not to flee to the suburbs in the private schools. to do that they had to convince them to keep their public schools and in their thinking i think part of it was that they are not going to want to send their kids downtown, and a lot of the schools had been under

resources and falling apart. so i think in their mind it made sense to close them because they haven't been putting a lot of resources and to them for a long time so they shut them down. it's partly just to make it work is logistical, but how do we maintain and keep the white middle class had been the situation. >> host: the activists that were pushing back the were less concerned with the class. there was a lot of argument they might have been totally okay with that, not the funding but for the stability in the community. they were fighting for other reasons. part of it was the tradition of the school itself. >> guest: absolutely. it was the tradition of -- was the tradition of black empowerment and that we built the school ourselves. we did this largely without a lot help from the school district, without a lot of resources. we had to fight for every penny.

and i think a lot of the people that i've talked to salles the way the busing have been or just the attitude of the desegregation is saying that black people basically failed during education and the community and they need this help. they need to have their kids. i heard that a lot and so i think there is this -- >> host: from the community or from the outside? >> guest: iowa heard that from the activist. you know, we shouldn't have to set them next to them for them to learn and i think there's an understandable frustration that it is deficient and our culture and community is being recognized as good as supply think that is one of the problems with the way desegregation was thought of and

implemented and we aren't going to share resources we are going to help you if that makes sense. >> host: is there any danger in that approach that could return us back to the 1954 mind-set of saying we are going to hold on to the schools just so we can say we have our own stuff and the national list kind of posture irrespective of what the outcome is. >> guest: i agree. i was telling the story of people who haven't been told or whose perspectives are not out there. it's a difficult question to say it's a question and we are dealing with now. can you close the school now because it doesn't have enough students and the test scores are

low or to try to keep it together even though those things are happening for the sake of the community, and i think that it's a difficult balance and i actually don't have the answer. >> host: one of the virtues of the book that is amazingly well written is to chronicle the perspective and highlight this perspective but you also help us track of the activists are engaged in the pushback and the victories are celebrated but people get a sense of the footprint, what it takes to get their. these activists were ultimately to advance a legal argument for the entire country, not just -- how do they do it? >> guest: a bunch of interesting and a eclectic people to spend time with but

they came at it from different -- very different places to be all the way lot of them had been friends one of them was a very gregarious football coach and he had a coach attitude and he'd written editorials constantly said they were sort of at the edges and active as some and kind of knew what they were doing when it came to doing community activism and another had been a part of the black nationalist movement in the 70's and so they had grown up from that and they were of the civil rights movement in some ways and that time period but also a sort of on the outside and critiquing and learning from it so they knew what they were doing. at the same time the people i wrote about and she was just a wonderful lady and she got very involved in protesting the first iraq war in the 90's and she was

very involved and that is how she sort of got because the school that she had gone into so they knew what they were doing, they were also very alone. they were a minority in a community and a lot of ways. ascent anachronism to be african-american activist fighting against desegregation which makes an interesting book. >> i can imagine our anchor but activists could have an argument and even get into the supreme court. how do you convince people, this is shorthand, right, it is to make schools better? >> guest: they were alone in bringing this first, they were behind the first federal case and they didn't end up going on

to the supreme court because they felt if they win their fight for just central that's what they cared about and some parents to get on but when i went through the research, and a lot of places you have fights or you had the naacp fighting on one side to maintain desegregation programs or expand them and then you would have a black school board member or urban league percent or group of parents on the other side saying let's get rid of this program. we want our neighborhood schools back. so i mean what they were lonely that they were not necessarily completely alone. >> host: they were also fighting these power brokers. i wonder, and maybe you can answer this the organizations are holding on to this because they think it makes policy sense

or if they're holding on to the tradition. the naacp makes its bones politically. the black organizations? >> guest: yes in some ways it is interesting on the board of the naacp. there you didn't have a huge uprising when they were bringing the case he didn't have a lot of black leaders in the community saying this is the wrong thing to do but we don't come in the uprising against them there was

people in the community that said yeah this hasn't really gone our way but it is an interesting question and i don't know. >> host: i don't think there is an answer. i often mondrian after reading your book i became more sort of compelled to question the reasons why these organizations like the naacp or other areas of the national level and the local level on the public policies have all of these symbolic values that don't necessarily played out on the ground for the people that are supposed to be helped. >> guest: illness of way is there is a need for the schools to be more diverse than they are and it's maybe not an academic need, but i do think that there is this idea that if we -- if

our kids are educated together then maybe our country will be less divided and it is economically they will understand when they are better not just in the traditional it was horrible, but i think that is what the education is really trying to do now. it's trying to say okay, you know, desegregation is mostly over in most places, so how do we deal with a bat and with the fact that in most cities and urban areas it is not even a possibility. it's not even feasible anymore.

>> host: based on the popular opinion or the legal terms -- >> guest: i think legally it's very hard to do any more to write about school choice movement and it's really gone into the consciousness of the american public and people feel like they deserve the right to have a choice in the schools and so they are going to implement a busing program and you have to send your kids here the have a huge archive it's not politically feasible it's a controlled choice program that the choices are managed, so that has sort of a underlined in the opportunity to do this. you have the growth of cities and some schools are becoming --

in the suburbs you have neighborhoods that have become more diverse you have the white middle class living back in and a lot in d.c. and new york -- >> host: i'm glad you mentioned that, the demographic landscape has gone so much that it almost makes no sense to even sort of reali on the kind of movement in the 50's and 60's in the urban areas in 1955 or 1975 you use new york city as an example of that and brooklyn and harlem look so different now part of what wonder is if they are taking account of those shifts, the policy shifts is making the demands for the new

approaches to education are they in a historical moment as well? >> guest: i think for parents to care about their kids in a and we hear people talk about parent involvement in schools they're focused on their kids and what's going to be happened they are getting into the very best school they possibly can and some parents have more savvy than others and figuring out of school that is and some people value different things about schools and been close to my house may be my kids and that sort of thing so people way out different things to and the people i talk to the parents those are the motivations so they were not thinking about

even kristol who took her case to the supreme court she wanted her son to get into the school she wanted him to go to so it wasn't i want to tear the system down that's not how she started out and for the most part we weren't thinking big pictures. >> host: it becomes a big picture, right? >> guest: all of those choices and that is what is so difficult about the school reform is you have these clashes so it's really hard to think about the good of the larger society when it is your child and in my personal case my parents sent me down to the school and my mother had spent time in the school where i went to elementary school before bouncing because she was familiar with the school

and she was a social worker and it was a rough school and a high poverty area so when she was sending me to that school i would imagine that it must have been difficult, but at the same time it had been i guess they had worked on the school to make its for the middle class families said they had an advanced program and that is what made it okay to go there and stay there and has stayed there for four because of was a good program, so i think that our parents could say we are doing a good thing because, you know, we are taking part investing and sending our kids but at the same time it is a good program. >> host: when did the program sort of die? >> guest: .

the school program is still solid. >> guest: there aren't many school districts around the country. i read about a study recently that look at how the district's in the 200 something that are doing is desegregation but it's still the school board that is supportive during the desegregation and they had to settle it because they can't just use race because the supreme court decision. >> host: in louisville in particular. >> guest: yeah. this is what got them involved in bringing this case it got so angry when they drew up the plan because they were going to draw from them back and forth and the

black areas of the city and the wide areas of the city so it's very clear and i think part of the frustration was bad and part of the frustration and the program is that you had it is going on here between poor black students and upper-middle-class you also have black students living in some middle and working-class neighborhoods it may be more of a factor of low-income and working-class whites, very large population. if they haven't been mixing but they have high poverty schools so it was perfectly integrated but every kid in the school's board which doesn't necessarily

solve -- i think it's important for those kids to know one another, but it doesn't necessarily stop the resource problem. >> host: which speaks to the other issues we have to take seriously in the reform. but they do broad policy. what's to the break first. >> host: so the book talks about desegregation and ultimately the parents frame it as a policy that's failed. talk to me about the reasons why. >> guest: to me the main reason i think is we are so frustrated by the way it is implanted in the undermining in some ways with the black people

wanted for their schools, so you had hundreds, thousands of black teachers fired now as it was implemented and then it is obviously not what people were looking for and fighting for this desegregation of schools and it's to make way for bringing the kids together schering kids away from the school and what impact this will but, the argument is that the black teachers are fine for black kids but white people, white parents don't want facebook.com/booktv would be scared to have black teachers. >> guest: that was the thinking at the time. you had mergers that happened in this house their situation but you have the school closures you

have the situations that i write about where the school is going to be a white school was pretty close to the kept on attacking and enrollment was an issue and so on so those parents had clout and political savvy that had something to do with that. they were fired and administrators. we have a fallout i don't think people anticipated. >> host: how did not foresee that? i kept reading the book thinking how did we receive this because a finite number of sources. there could have been an expectation of fairness that we have a seniority system or something and the teachers that knew us, but in the 50's and 60's and 70's they would be fired. is this not foreseeable --

>> guest: mike understanding is this needed to happen. we just needed to get rid of this dual system of education because it was so much more unfair. having the two systems you had different salary scales for black and white teachers before the desegregation or you haven't had any integration between faculties and you have second hand but that was just sort of you had to get rid of that. so i think -- i have no idea if people foresaw. i would imagine that we actually had in the south i think you had some ambivalence about this because i do think that some people saw this is potentially

going to hurt my school or i am going to lose my job if we have to integrate because they are not going to want me teaching their kids. there were some interesting polls that were done and they were not very reliable with the interesting in that they showed right after brown v board so some people saw it and it was important to getting rid of the schools for may be worth at risk. but it had a fall out and i think maybe it could have been anticipated, but there is especially reports that were done something like that activist actively tracking this and saying look, look at how many black teachers we had and how many we have now and how many we used to have some people

were pointing it out at the time. >> host: media reading into it too much and i do that a lot, the black activists, but policy makers and advocacy groups are constantly changing symbolic victories at the expense of real policy victories. it seems to me that this was foreseeable. it seems to me that all the signs were there. but at the end of legal segregation of such an important and symbolic victory maybe not just for black people but for america it was an extraordinary that all of these other sort of a residual effect were damaged because as you said were worth it because we ended the legal segregation. would that be a fair analysis? >> guest: it's hard for me to say. i think every time you are

looking at these issues there is a feasibility during the dream of what could be and then it's like what's practical and what can we do, what is politically possible and what was politically possible in the 50's it obviously brown v. board had a lot of other ripple effect siphoned that more of a deal in the that were important. so i don't know of those calculations are made and we are not going to get everything that we want but we will at least to get this big symbolic victory. but i think leaving the difference is it is still an important factor in. >> host: but it just wasn't good. it wasn't going to work like it was supposed to work.

i think they were finding there was this dream that was going to open up the board to the corridors to be educated together and there was limited progress that still today you can look at the resources that the minority schools had and compare them to the suburbs and you see huge disparities. >> host: there's another piece though, the collateral effect sort of liquidating schools in terms of teachers, human capital and those sort of things that was also the community affect. the communities were broken.

>> guest: you talk about your neighborhood school and i don't have an experience of a neighborhood school, so why don't really get that because i didn't go, but my school -- i loved my school and but there was a very important to people and what is the prospective offer a community? >> guest: i think especially looking back at the history of education that there's a deeper pride in a lot of the schools were built because it started out in people's homes and churches so this isn't something that white society is set here is your schools, the black communities built themselves for for letterpress and the north

and a lot of cases, but there's more than just the school down the street complete to my house and we can hang out at the pta meetings and we built this pride and it's very symbolic. >> host: it's in the policy. >> guest: but i think the symbolic matters. it matters to people. it's about your identity and who you are. it is a tension that i look at a lot in the book. people are grappling with am i american or african-american and how you deal with assimilation and success that is the heart of

what a lot of people were grappling with how much of that identity and culture do i have to give up in order to succeed so there is symbolism but there's a deeper question that's important. >> host: part of how people hold on interpreting in the book they hold onto that with the collective community identity is a kind of stable including middle class people and working people of the rich and upper middle class professional class with a sort of blue-collar class all in the same neighborhood without a word the fragmented as soon as they had a chance to leave the neighborhoods to.

>> guest: when i was looking at the suburbs it's interesting their rates for much bigger. the numbers are smaller so there's fewer people. >> host: that's the argument if there are no schools of this food and security and housing opportunities they wouldn't be there either the argument is that's why they have to stay and rebuild but that's been the most educated and most resources and responsible it's the same with the school choice argument to take their kids to the charter school option or whatever. so to that extent once again it's a pretty persuasive

argument this isn't a good thing because we are letting them go elsewhere. >> guest: as a journalist and always careful about the argument but i do think that there was a very the gentle fallout and the answer isn't to just not have desegregation, not to have listed segregation laws and jim crow. obviously that is not the answer. i think there were federal policies that made it attractive for people to move out of the city and into the suburbs and took part these vibrant neighborhoods that used to exist and come in and so on so it wasn't just a little move to the suburbs all of a sudden. this was federal policy choices

and local policy choices to make this easy so the people that had the money to go out could get out. so, you know, i think that there was issues but it wasn't just desegregation. there was a lot of other things that went on to facilitate what went wrong. so just as desegregation didn't fix the achievement gap, it helped probably but it also didn't cause all these problems that it was one of the factors. >> host: i think your book has that complexity and the masterful way talking about the supreme court because that you mentioned while this was rooted in the grassroots activism parents for themselves in the neighborhood in some ways ultimately becomes a supreme court and the changes in the complexion of the nation it in this desegregation.

>> guest: it got out of their hands. i think they couldn't find anybody to be their lawyer in the first place so they found a really interesting guy, he's enthusiastic. he saw this is an opportunity and he was compelled by their story, but it was taken out by white parents who sort of wanted to send their kid to a good school and they couldn't because of their race so they to get on to the supreme court and it was a big deal in some ways i think as kind of a bookend of something that was already happening so even when that decision came down most school districts were not doing us any more, so in some ways it was just an official end to something that had already been leaning in a lot of ways. >> host: but it did allow for a conversation about the role that the race plays in public policy, right? that still matters now, but

because of the same time this is happening you have the affirmative action debate we are still wrestling with the question what role should the race played? it codified in as a trend saying that it can't be. but not the only thing. >> guest: that's right. >> host: what are some of the of factors based on the supreme court decision? >> guest: there are parental the education and you have -- you can look at race and poverty levels and they tend to coincide but the big idea now is that we should be looking at the socio-economic status and using that as the basis of integrating schools at k-12 level in bob this is a big happening in higher read as well rather than affirmative action, which tends

to, you know, opponents say it is the best and brightest. we should be using for a class instead because he is so few attending the universities. >> host: the challenge being you could end up in a place like louisville. you end up with a bunch of poor white kids and poor black kids and another? >> guest: that was a complaint all along, one of the complaints all along is that you had high poverty schools but i think it is a compelling case that race still matters to say yes the income can capture and can be a proxy for making sure we also have racial diversity that racial diversity matters because people come with different experiences and they say that

the experience of race is more than just about income, so for black americans for example the wealth gap i think is much harder to measure and that he may have differentiation cnn.com but it's a different matter. >> host: it could be poverty which is more john. >> guest: that's harder to capture. those experiences are caught up in the history of discrimination and of segregation and the continued institutional races in this country that those things are not captured by just looking at the class so that is the argument we still need to do affirmative action or, you know, a sign schools based on race.

>> host: do the parents have a value on that? i understand the national. i never said we want to protect or schools and we don't want to lose this legacy, but was there a division within the community that sort of mer heard the arguments of the liberal elite to say that we need to tell you the diversity for the state's that there's something good in a school about having blacks and whites and latinos in the same place, sort of the argument that they might have something to offer a school. >> guest: it's interesting because the two families that i focused on, deon and gwen, the mom and daughter had different opinions on this and in jacqueline's case she had a horrible experience when she was

back in the 70's out to this white working-class, fairly high poverty neighborhood kids this bidding at her and just an awful experience that had been nervous about sending her kids when they had to be busbee eventually but they had a good experience and so she can change her mind. she saw this is important. my kids have had opportunities that they would not have had if the had gone to the school across the street, which was still despite the buses it was still struggling local -- yes. when we talked about she said you know, these opportunities more important. they met people they wouldn't have met and they've had experience is that they wouldn't have gone camping or been able

to do that for them. so, that said, she had a really good experiences. she ended up going to school actually nearby neighborhood we sort of switched places at different times and she had good experiences but she also felt things were inherently wrong and didn't, you know, it didn't matter. she should be able to go and have the same experiences on the street from her house. so, i mean it's just -- >> host: the policymaker would disagree with that, you have all schools to be traced schools or equal. >> guest: easier said than done. >> guest: >> host: your book offers a critique of desegregation, sort of talking about an oversimplified analysis of it

works or doesn't work for that matter. so talking about that, you pick up this book and they are going to have strong and responsive as your book says that they interpret your book saying too much government, the government intervention as the problem. but it's reasonable to interpret your book that i. mehdi libertarian this is what happens when the keep tinkering and engineering they make it desegregated and make us equal and we end up hurting the people we were trying to help that's what happens when the government gets in the way. >> guest: it's not necessarily -- i think the issue is who is running the government and for

whose benefit and that will end up happening with desegregation. the problem is the decisions are being made with for the most part a sort of a constituency in mind and keeping them happy. that wasn't just the white middle class by the way. there's also we are trying to keep the black civil rights liberal class who filed for segregation and others definitely that contingent in louisville fighting for desegregation, very intensely all these years as well and so yeah but in terms of what works, you know, i listened to lots of people every day talking and i don't have an answer because i spend a lot of time -- i spent a lot of time in really good schools that seem to be working and there's always something

that is problematic but why it is working so well and it's a hard question to answer. one of the things in interested in as this effort to do school choice and diversity of the same time which is a new trend so this is something that charter schools became interested in but they are starting that charter schools where the purpose is to create diversity you'd think everyone would say school choice and desegregation. it's voluntary that there's a huge controversy. part of it is an anticharter school argument why don't you come in and work on the schools we have bursa's all opening a new school that will take the

students doing well. >> host: it is the high involvement to and over the top and go to the other schools leading the traditional public schools to have what is left. >> guest: that is the main issue but i went to the really fascinating schools in atlanta where they had mixed income communities as a planned community not only was the school it was becoming more diverse the issue is the had to tear, projects that were there and they didn't get to stay. >> host: it often accompanies and so i ran an idea by you.

i said a person could read this as the consequence of the liberal democratic tinkering, right? you try to appease the civil rights movement it doesn't work we were just an argument not in the argument of your book but another argument is this is exactly why we need a school trays and the most literal sense possible and i don't mean political liberal i mean we should we of the options with access to vouchers and we chicago to get education to increase funding for home-schooled options and the charter school movements should expand and become privatized. there is that argument as well. why do we need more schools? >> guest: no, i don't think so. partly what i -- the choice isn't a bad thing. i think the parents want it and

kids benefit from different learning environments and they do what they think is best for their kids. one of the issues with school choice is the issue of equity and if we care about equity and about providing a good option for every child there are the kids who don't have the parents the will be able to navigate all the traces and i think that we have found that in new york city as an example for high school there are hundreds of traces of schools that you can go to that you found regular high schools a lot of those have struggled because they tend to get the kids who don't make an active choice if that makes us cents. so it is just like desegregation there are problems that come with that that need to be dealt

with and thought about and i think we can look back at desegregation and think okay this works and this doesn't work and really think about not necessarily the critique of the schools in the theater for ideas that happening now but as a way to make them better or more fossil but try to avoid repeating some of the same mistakes. >> host: in your entire but you haven't solved -- >> guest: not yet. maybe my next book. [laughter] sounds good. >> that was "after words," booktv signature program and which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists, public policy makers, legislators and others familiar with their material. "after words" airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p.m. on

saturday, 12 p.m. and 9 p.m. on sunday and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch online. go to book tv and click on "after words" on the series and topics list on the upper right side of the page.

the late photojournalist leonard documented the march on washington from preparations to the day of the proceedings and its aftermath. his hundreds of photographs have been carried by his widow and accompanied by an essay by michael eric dyson with an after word. they discussed a collection of